9.04.2014

Nothing From Nothing

Nothing comes from nothing.

UNKNOWN

I used to be an atheist. The funny thing is that many of the atheists who knew me now deny that I was ever an atheist. Somehow, in my heart, I was still a believer. This is only partly true as I can see that this is visible in all atheists. This is known as the imago Dei or image of God. Even atheists are made in the image of God. They would prefer to think of human beings as merely clever monkeys in order to deny this image of God. But human beings contemplate abstractions that have virtually no value to their need to survive or reproduce. Religion is the one thing that humans are universally compelled to seek. People will do without many things including an education, but religion is a constant demanding vast resources of time, money, and energy. Even atheists attend churches even while denying God's existence because they feel compelled to scratch the itch they deny having. Does any of this prove God's existence? No, it doesn't. But it does prove that human beings have a deep and universal desire for God to exist.

The material proof for God's existence is all around us. Romans 1:20 says, "For since the creation of the world His invisible attributes, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood through what has been made, so that they are without excuse." Now, this verse has always been familiar to me for my entire life. I used to scoff at it as an atheist, but I see the profundity of it now. With some help from St. Thomas Aquinas, St. Paul gives the most elegant evidence we should ever need for believing in God. The universe exists. We exist. Things exist. But these things are not eternal. They must come from something that is eternal. The converse is to believe that something came from nothing. But we know better. Nothing comes from nothing.

To deny that nothing comes from nothing, we would have to say that the universe had no beginning. This was the strategy of the atheist David Hume who denied the beginning of a universe. As Hume put it, "Why may not the material universe be the necessary existent Being, according to this pretended explanation of necessity?" Bertrand Russell put it more succinctly when he said, "The universe is just there, and that's all." Basically, the atheist must believe in an uncreated universe. The material universe is the ground of all that exists and nothing more. It always was.

The first and most basic problem with this line of thinking is that it turns all atheists into pantheists. The universe itself becomes their god. Science goes from being an explanation to being a religion. Things like the "invisible hand" and "natural selection" and "the selfish gene" and on and on begin to take on the same nature as Providence. You can watch a program like Carl Sagan's Cosmos and come away with the notion that the entire thing is a hymn of adoration to the material universe. Or, you have an atheist like Richard Dawkins claiming we should be grateful to the universe that we ever existed in the first place. But this is utterly stupid. Should I be grateful to my car for starting in the morning? Should I be grateful to my toaster for toasting my English muffin? Being grateful to the material universe is stupid because the universe doesn't care.

The second problem with this line of thinking is that it just isn't so. Atheists scoffed at the arguments of Aquinas until the Big Bang was discovered. That discovery shows that the universe was created. Now, atheists try to claim the Big Bang as their own utterly forgetting that it was their tribe that denied it in the first place. You can deny the Big Bang, but this will also require you to deny much of what is considered science today.

The atheists have already begun efforts on a workaround to this problem of the Big Bang which hypothesizes a larger universe outside of this present one. This is known as multiverse theory or M-theory. There is no scientific proof for this at all. Basically, it is a way to go back to Hume. And why do they want to go back to Hume? Leibniz has the answer when he asks a question. "Why is there something rather than nothing?" In other words, how do you get something from nothing?

Nothing comes from nothing. The human mind cannot fathom how something comes from nothing. The best you can do with that sort of mystery is become Buddhist and sit under a tree contemplating it. This would be an escape from reason. Reason demands God's existence. If you accept that nothing comes from nothing, the entire universe becomes a testimony to God's existence. Atheism is not a tenable answer anymore. The least conclusion that you can come to is that of the Deist, the Freemason, and the cult of the Enlightenment. God exists. The Deist simply believes in a god that doesn't care.

The truth of God's existence is seen visibly and known intuitively. This is what St. Paul was getting at. It also explains the ubiquity of religion across human civilization. The only real debate is not whether God exists or does not exist but if God cares. That is the subject of another essay. I think the point of this essay has already been made. Nothing comes from nothing. God must exist. It is unfathomable that all of this sprang from a void of emptiness. It defies reason. You can escape into unreason, but this will only make you irrational and insane. There is a God.